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Surgery Residents Score Big at Sunriver

At the recent joint meeting of the Oregon and Washington Chapters of the American College of Surgeons held in Sunriver from June 12-15, 2014, ten surgery residents and one OHSU medical student presented research that they had performed with surgical faculty at OHSU over the past year. These presentations were uniformly of outstanding quality. Although all were well worthy of prizes for the science, as well as the polished presentation of the speakers, three were singled out as winners of the Baker-Moseley prizes in their respective categories: Sean McCully, M.D. for best basic science presentation for “High, medium and low ascorbic acid concentrations in reconstituted lyophilized plasma demonstrate comparable hemodynamic and viscoelastic coagulation responses following polytraumatic injury”; Amanda Graff-Baker, M.D. for best clinical science presentation for “Expanded criteria for carcinoid liver debulking: Maintaining survival and increasing the number of eligible patients”; and Mackenzie Cook, M.D. for best education paper for “A multidisciplinary disease-specific rotation can be successfully incorporated into surgical residency.” Cristina Budde, M.D.’s presentation, “Chemoradiotherapy with a radiation boost for anal cancer decreases the risk for salvage abdominoperineal resection: Analysis from the National Cancer Data Base,” was selected by the state Committee on Cancer to go forward to the national competition. We are extremely proud of all of the residents for their stellar performances.

Equally impressive and especially endearing to the OHSU faculty was the outstanding achievement of the OHSU “Jeopardy! Team” of Drs. Cristina Budde, Mackenzie Cook, Kelly Fair, Nicole Gordon, and Alexis Moren in their first ever win over the team from Washington. Although the Washington team prevailed in the question part of the competition by 1000 points (the product of lightning-fast buzzer-pushing to answer an easy 1000-point question regarding the most common benign tumor found in the esophagus), the OHSU team’s laparoscopic skills prevailed in a most convincing 3-0 score over the Washington residents in the surprise Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery “smack-down.” Mac Cook’s peg transfer speed, Cristina Budde’s precise and speedy circle-cutting, and Nicole Gordon’s intra-corporeal knot-tying wizardry caught their opponents flat-footed, and led to the first OHSU Jeopardy victory in memory!